]]>https://falconfour.wordpress.com/2016/11/28/parse-error-on-androidcyanogenmod-just-enable-package-installer-storage-permission/feed/1falconfourPayday: The Heist Input Lag – REAL fix for ATI usershttps://falconfour.wordpress.com/2014/09/28/payday-the-heist-input-lag-real-fix-for-ati-users/
https://falconfour.wordpress.com/2014/09/28/payday-the-heist-input-lag-real-fix-for-ati-users/#respondMon, 29 Sep 2014 00:34:24 +0000http://falconfour.wordpress.com/?p=369]]>I’ve got a Lenovo T500 laptop, and bought Payday (1, or The Heist) to play coop with the roommate on the living room gaming PC. So, naturally, I was a bit disappointed to find that my laptop’s dedicated Radeon HD 3650 was giving the game so much trouble. The GPU doesn’t have GPU Compute capabilities, so all the physics work has to be done on the CPU. No problem, I’ve got a Core 2 Duo P9500, about as high as you can get in this PC. But the GPU cannot be upgraded without a whole new PC. Typically, I just leave the integrated Intel graphics enabled, and ATI switched off – I’m not a gamer, so I don’t play many games.

This PC has no trouble playing Portal 2 at max settings and full HD 1920×1200 on my HD laptop display, though… but in Payday, the input lag is so bad, it’s impossible to even navigate the menus with nearly a 600msec delay on all inputs! Move mouse up, half a second later the mouse moves up on screen. Try aiming for menu options when the mouse is so far behind where it’s being moved, you overshoot EVERYTHING, even basic navigation controls on the menus.

Problem: the engine was running at nearly 15 FPS, high enough to be visibly acceptable, but this apparently screws with the engine timing. It has to be near enough to the refresh rate (50hz in my unusual setup, I can’t get it to stay at 60Hz without resetting next time I plug/unplug AC power) that it doesn’t drop frames to sync with the screen.

Solution: axe some quality options. The game has quite possibly the worst graphics configuration page in the industry, allowing only resolution and some texture quality tweaks… but not the stuff that counts that it clearly is incapable of auto-detecting. The flip queue size is a big one, from what I understand – causing the GPU or game engine to queue up too many frames and ignoring input latency.

Enter ATI Tray Tools. It lets you change the hidden settings of the driver/platform to squeeze the extra performance needed to run this game smoothly. Install it (defaults), open it, and use the tray icon to set:3D -> Antialiasing -> Application controlled (“Disabled” would be nice, but only the game has that control for some reason)3D -> Anisotropic Filtering -> Performance, then “Application Controlled” (I have a feeling that though it greys them out after setting Application Controlled, the Performance option sets some additional settings under the hood as well)3D -> Texture Preference -> Performance3D -> Mipmap -> Performance (seeing a trend yet? lol)3D -> Wait for vertical sync -> Always off (we never, ever want the GPU waiting on anything petty like the screen refresh rate, tearing will never ever happen here on this chip)3D -> Flip queue size -> 1 – this is my setting right now, though “0” is commonly recommended – play with it and see what gives better performance for you.

In the game:Texture quality: Low (minimal impact, if you have more GPU RAM than the minimum spec, then you can safely bump this up)Antialiasing: OffAnisotropic: OffV-sync: OffStreaks: Off (though I can probably turn a few of these back on, as they rely on CPU and not so much GPU)Light adaption: Off (adaptation, rather? Dunno, but same as above, may be irrelevant)

And now, I went from 15 FPS in the menus to a blistering 50 FPS, and the cursor moves instantly, as does the control in the game.

It’s a damned shame Overkill never even addressed these issues, and everyone in the forums acts like Compatibility Mode (zero effect on mine) or a patched d3d9.dll file (also zero effect, except a blank screen on the second version of the patched file I tried), is some kind of fix that’ll work for anyone. No amount of config file tweaks, patches, or other crap helped until I did these things in ATI Tray Tools.

Windowed mode also helps, but who wants to play the game in a pinhole?

]]>https://falconfour.wordpress.com/2014/09/28/payday-the-heist-input-lag-real-fix-for-ati-users/feed/0falconfourATITrayToolsSamsung BD-D5700 Blu-Ray Player Performance Fixhttps://falconfour.wordpress.com/2013/09/15/samsung-bd-d5700-blu-ray-player-performance-fix/
https://falconfour.wordpress.com/2013/09/15/samsung-bd-d5700-blu-ray-player-performance-fix/#commentsSun, 15 Sep 2013 12:43:43 +0000http://falconfour.wordpress.com/?p=331]]>I picked up a BD-D5700 back in Christmas 2011 on sale at Best Buy for $100. Cool – I can get a Blu-Ray player for $100! I’m in. It turned out to be $100 for a reason – it was dirt slow.

Finally, now in 2013 and fairly out of warranty, I cracked open the case. Inside, I found this.

The motherboard is about the size of a CD case, powered by a BCM7631 chip (Broadcom only has pages for BCM7630 and BCM7632 – weird). That powerful Broadcom SoC is cooled by one TINY layer of aluminum – barely as thick as a typical CPU’s heat spreader. Worse yet, the thermal compound was a pad, not even grease – leaving large burnt-out hot spots in the pad. The CPU is clearly overheating and thermal-throttling to prevent damage, and Samsung seems to have used that burn-out throttling to “class” the player as a cheap, slow device.

The heat needs to escape the chip quickly, and to do that, it needs somewhere to conduct to in a bubble area around the chip. In the current plate design, the top and center of the chip would get very hot very quickly, as there’s nowhere to conduct the heat to. We need a bigger heatsink.

The heat sink here is from a dead PC motherboard. The spacing between the pegs straddles two different positions on the Samsung board, so the two spring mechanisms need to have very different tensions. I accomplished this by using two different spring clips (note above) and weakening the spring on the white one. This ensures the heat sink will stay centered on the chip, so that a lever action doesn’t lift the corner off the chip.

Now, you need to clean and prep the board and the new heatsink. I use ArctiClean and Arctic Silver Ceramique 2. Your goal is to clean both surfaces until the only thing you see is the mirror of the chip and the grain of the metal (or, preferably, the mirror finish) of the heat sink.

A dob’ll do ya. Leave it beaded (careful about air pockets) so the heat sink will spread it evenly without trapping air.

As you assemble it, note how the heat sink rests flat on the chip.

And reassemble.

Done. Enjoy your player with a bit more pep in its step. Keeping that heat sink cool is key – now that it’s pulling away more of the heat from the chip and allowing it to run faster, it’ll produce more heat. Keep that in mind, and you’ll have a great player!

]]>https://falconfour.wordpress.com/2013/08/08/falconfours-ultimate-boot-cd-v4-61-patch/feed/102falconfourFalconFour’s Ultimate Boot CD/USB 4.6https://falconfour.wordpress.com/2013/03/31/falconfours-ultimate-boot-cd-usb-v4-6-f4ubcd/
https://falconfour.wordpress.com/2013/03/31/falconfours-ultimate-boot-cd-usb-v4-6-f4ubcd/#commentsMon, 01 Apr 2013 07:35:07 +0000http://falconfour.wordpress.com/?p=314]]>Hola amigos. I don’t speak Spanish, but, you know, trying to stay hip. Like actually releasing a new version, that sounds like an awesome idea, doesn’t it? Hell, v4.5 had so many holes that’ve been fixed in v4.6, it made 4.5 look like Swiss cheese. And I’m sure the Swiss have even used this thing. It’s been all the way around the internet and back – in fact, v4.6 was created on a laptop I bought from a guy on eBay (just shopping around) that uses my disc as well! I was amazed. This thing has seen some mileage.

In this boot CD are the most popular and useful tools anyone would ever need. The best of the free software, the best of the commercial software, and it all fits on one CD-R that’s readable by any computer worth booting on. Not everything can read a DVD, and USB booting is hit and miss at best.

Meanwhile, since the last release in 2011, more has changed. I wrote off the dry, stale corporate IT world of wastefulness and over-powered, under-utilized systems and unnecessary, poorly planned “cloud” services. Currently unemployed (at least, as of this release!), I found some time to put some major polish on MiniXP and get everything working well. Still would love to work in computer repair. Anyone? I’ll even move. Anything? Anyone? Bueller? Bueller?

This disc, an even more minor single-point revision, is actually a huge MiniXP update. Other tools have been updated, like Memtest86+, which has been replaced with the more frequently updated Memtest86, with a smarter loading mechanism. Tons of updates in MiniXP. AHCI support, for one thing. Better driver support for network and wireless drivers, faster (and more reliable) startup, better error reporting/catching, better graphics, better compatibility with more tools and software, and… Flash support in the latest Portable Firefox! Yes, you can watch YouTube from MiniXP now. And access TeamViewer/LogMeIn which uses Flash. LOTS of work has been put into polishing the startup routine and compatibility.

Plenty of features from v4.5: Virtual Floppy enables you to mount images from a USB stick to be used in a boot selection like MiniXP (for F6 SATA/RAID drivers) or FreeDOS (Dell option). VFD with file copy allows you to make a <1mb RAR file accessible to DR-DOS or Hiren’s DOS in a virtual floppy. Wireless drivers in MiniXP along with improved Ethernet and storage support. Mini Linux provided by RIP Linux. Bootable partition and imaging utilities provided by Acronis True Image and EASEUS Partition Manager. Improved Memtest86+ with failsafe mode to resolve startup hangs. Kon-Boot 1.1 is really v1.1 now, with support for 32-bit and 64-bit Windows. Tons of new utilities in MiniXP with new launchers to provide easier access. ERD 5.0 is integrated with MiniXP for offline system restore and service/driver management, and Microsoft DaRT 6.5 (x86 and x64) are added to support Windows Vista and 7. Antivirus scanning with real-time updates is provided by DaRT 6.5’s Standalone System Sweeper, and allows you to load definitions to a USB stick for live updating.

So why in the FUCK are we still forced to endure 8KHz audio as the “norm” for telephone calls? I can’t even hold back here – that is nothing but bullshit. I don’t even answer phone calls anymore. With the mess of cell phones garbling audio quality and working to uphold that 8KHz piss-poor standard, I find myself spending most of my mental effort on the phone trying to decode the words said by the person on the other end, instead of thinking about the topic at hand. The only thing I ever want to do when I get/make a phone call to someone, is how much longer I must endure this conversation before I can get off the phone again.

Sick of this crap. Telecom companies, it’s time to upgrade your standards. The standard should be 44.1KHz like it is for everything else. Digital compression (AAC-ELD, maybe?) is within the realm of possibility for all PSTN connections, so why hasn’t any effort been made to phase in a newer standard? We get crystal-clear audio through VoIP connections that aren’t tethered to this arcane 64kbps/8KHz PCM standard. So why the hell can’t we get digital compression between callers? If you’re worried about loss in digital signals over a PSTN connection (i.e. dial-up modems), then just use a lossless compression scheme to fit higher bandwidth into that 64kbps bandwidth! But FFS, don’t keep screwing real people to make old dial-up crap technology happy. You can detect those signals and automatically apply a different compression scheme to them. Look at what Skype does. It automatically adapts to bandwidth needs in real-time during a call. Why can’t you do that for phone calls?

Get with it, because I’m sick of being afraid of picking up the phone and hearing some garbled 8KHz crap.

From back to front: first cleaning effort, followed by a couple cleaning cycles before the second (ghosting) print, then I got HP Toolbox working. Corrected some settings (below) and subsequent test prints got better and better, with the final result looking like a brand new printer – JUST with some settings changes.

Missing your shortcut for the LaserJet Toolbox? Yeah, we all are. HP apparently thought it would be a funny joke to just… you know, OMIT the desktop/Start Menu shortcut for the HP Color LaserJet 1600 Toolbox from all their driver distributions online now. So if you don’t have the original driver from the original CD, you’re screwed! And HP’s site will mock you as it walks you step-by-step through how to use the HP Toolbox, but yet the icon they’re referring to is LITERALLY FREAKING MISSING. Gone. Poof. It’s nowhere to be found. Uninstall? User’s guide? Got it. Toolbox? No.

OK, so a huge oversight on HP’s part. I want to smack ’em. Here’s how you get that back.

For Color LaserJet 2600 series, it’s a little more complicated since I have a 1600 – which is a 2600 without the networking/duplex capabilities – same logic board, same drivers, just different branding. The process may be identical but with the “1600” replaced with “2600” in the line above. Version 5.x of the drivers (the current one available from hp.com) has the HTTP server (zhhp*.exe) completely REMOVED from the distribution, so the toolbox is literally GONE. You’ll need an older version – and to write a much-needed hate mail to HP for removing it. The “full software solution” download does not seem to have the HP Toolbox files. Maybe the “PnP software” distribution will have it, but look for the “ZHHP*.exe” executable – the “H” is for “HTTP”, the “ZSHP*.exe” file is “S” for “Status (monitor)”.

Launched using the shortcut in this blog post. Up yours, HP!

If you get an HTTP 500 error when you try to access the site (localhost:3911), it means your command line wasn’t correct or it couldn’t find the file you referenced on the command line. It’s very, very ambiguous with the errors.

Also, if you have problems with mirroring/echoing down the page, turn down the fuser temperature under “print modes” for your paper type (almost always the first one, “plain paper”) – set it to Less Fusing. If you have trouble with dirty/messy grey background fuzz, turn on “Background Toner” under the print options menu, and turn “Transfer Current” to “Dry Paper”, turn “Toner” down to “Less Toner” for those print types.

Hope this helps someone out with an old 1600/2600. It sure cleaned mine up!

]]>https://falconfour.wordpress.com/2013/01/25/hp-color-laserjet-16002600n-toolbox-needlessly-well-guarded-secret/feed/24falconfourFrom back to front: first cleaning effort, followed by a couple cleaning cycles before the second (ghosting) print, then I got HP Toolbox working. Corrected some settings (below) and subsequent test prints got better and better, with the final result looking like a brand new printer - JUST with some settings changes.Launched using the shortcut in this blog post. Up yours, HP!Re: Forum/Reality Disconnecthttps://falconfour.wordpress.com/2012/12/23/re-forumreality-disconnect/
https://falconfour.wordpress.com/2012/12/23/re-forumreality-disconnect/#commentsMon, 24 Dec 2012 03:42:54 +0000http://falconfour.wordpress.com/?p=278]]>I just saw this absolutely amazing post by Gregg Eshelman in reply to an old blog article, “Forum/Reality Disconnect“, and thought it just had to be shared on its own.

The two most annoying things on technical fora (including ye olde USENET) are the people who will not read *in full* the OP and tell the person to do EXACTLY what he said he’d already tried *that did not work*.

Apparently many people are incapable of reading and comprehending plain language, or at least incapable of thinking beyond a set of rote responses for what they assume is a common issue. READ the entire post so you don’t look like a clueless, script reading “tech support” goon by telling the person with the problem to do what they’ve already tried.

Even worse is when I’ve posted links to articles with fixes that are supposed to work but didn’t and someone replies *with the exact same links*.

If you cannot READ then come up with something different, don’t bother to reply, not even to say you don’t know of anything different. It only pisses people off.

Then there are the hosers who figure out or simply stumble upon a fix for their issue and cap the thread with an “I fixed it!” without saying HOW they fixed it.

HTF did you fix it? I’m reading this thread because I’m trying to fix the exact same problem. C’mon, GIVE! Tell the world how you fixed it!

I’d love to mod a tech forum just so I could kickban both sorts. Help or say nothing. Don’t be useless or condescending. People come to these forums for help. It doesn’t matter if a search of the forum would turn up the answer if the person with a problem has no idea *what to search for*.

Most forum searches are quite useless. Given the heavy use of numbers and acronyms and “nonsense words” and words of 4 or fewer characters in computer jargon and how the default search indexing is set to exclude such things, it’s highly likely that a forum search wouldn’t work anyway. A tech forum search should be set with as broad an index setting as possible. Too bad if it makes for a giant index, if someone is searching for info on a GBX-39/WQ23 ver9.53.2 *all the numbers and punctuation characters are important*.

15~20 years ago, web searches were much better. If you knew EXACTLY what you wanted to find you could put quotes around it and the search would look for EXACTLY that, nothing else. These days they all “suggest” that we’re all a bunch of idiots who don’t know what we’re looking for and everything entered in the box is spelled incorrectly. Try putting quotes or + and – signs in and they’re ignored.

I was just trying to find out reasons why Microsoft DaRT 6.0 wouldn’t boot and what’s the top “hits”? People asking why their DODGE Dart won’t start. I tried adding -dodge and still got bogus “hits” on the car.

Companies like to creatively spell words in their names and product names. When someone enters such, *they are not spelling it wrong!* so don’t ignore it and present only hits with the ‘corrected’ version.

The computer world needs a “search idiot” that only looks for EXACTLY what’s entered and strictly obeys boolean operators and regex commands. I wouldn’t care if the query has to go into a queue and I’d have to wait some time for a reply, as long as the results only contain links to sites that actually contain what I’m looking for.

For some years I’ve had a name for such a search engine, LookStupid – as in “Look, you stupid computer, I know what I’m doing! Stop trying to outsmart me!”.

I agree 100%. I wonder if the owner of DuckDuckGo would be able to come up with a search engine aggregator like LookStupid…

]]>https://falconfour.wordpress.com/2012/12/23/re-forumreality-disconnect/feed/1falconfourDisable DXVA to fix Windows 8 BSOD on Experience Index testhttps://falconfour.wordpress.com/2012/11/21/disable-dxva-to-fix-windows-8-bsod-on-experience-index-test/
https://falconfour.wordpress.com/2012/11/21/disable-dxva-to-fix-windows-8-bsod-on-experience-index-test/#commentsThu, 22 Nov 2012 07:51:42 +0000http://falconfour.wordpress.com/?p=265]]>Crashing while trying to run the Experience Index test “Tuning Windows Media decoding”? Well, I found a solution for the problem on a GeForce 6200 PCI (256mb) used to bring Aero to an older Pentium 4 HT PC.

Disable DXVA2. It crashes while trying to use the GPU to accelerate decoding h264 video.

Go here: http://bluesky23.yu-nagi.com/en/ – grab DXVA Checker. Run it. Install .NET if need be. Go to the “DSF/MFT” tab and click the DSF/MFT Viewer button. Under both “DirectShow” and “Media Foundation”, look in the list for entries shown in red – these are DXVA-accelerated. Click one of them – first in my list is “Microsoft H264 Video Decoder MFT”. In the lower-right corner, click the button “GPU Acceleration”, and select “Disable DXVA2” if there is an option for it. I don’t think disabling all GPU acceleration is necessary.

Reboot (not sure if it’s necessary, but a good idea) and try the test again. If it still fails, go back and perform “Disable” for GPU acceleration on each. It should now be fixed!

]]>https://falconfour.wordpress.com/2012/11/21/disable-dxva-to-fix-windows-8-bsod-on-experience-index-test/feed/16falconfourDo not use Windows Installer Cleanup Utility to “clean” your PC. DON’T.https://falconfour.wordpress.com/2011/06/28/do-not-use-windows-installer-cleanup-utility-to-clean-your-pc-dont/
https://falconfour.wordpress.com/2011/06/28/do-not-use-windows-installer-cleanup-utility-to-clean-your-pc-dont/#commentsTue, 28 Jun 2011 18:58:48 +0000http://falconfour.wordpress.com/?p=255]]>OK, I was just idly browsing along (trying to fix a Windows Installer problem), and I found this article…

… describing why the utility is NOT to be used for “cleaning up” your PC. It’s 110% correct – I’ve seen too many idiotic, uninformed bloggers posting “cleanup guides” with absolutely destructive advice (like disabling themes, services, etc). This is one of the more rare ones but I want to throw this out there in case there are some think-they’re-geeks out there that use the Installer Cleanup Utility as a “cleanup” tool.

The only thing this utility does to “clean” is to clean in the “what was dirty” sense, to gut a program’s configuration from Windows Installer, not from your computer! It just makes Windows Installer “forget” that a program was ever installed, so that installation issues can be resolved to re-install and cleanly uninstall the related program. It does NOT “clean” your computer of the installed program – hell, it doesn’t even uninstall it in the formal sense. All its files will still remain.

Personally, I use its “msizip G” as part of a cleanup routine, which removes orphaned Installer files – product packages that are located in the Windows\Installer folder, but not associated with any product that’s installed. Usually from failed Office updates or the like.